


Dona Nobis Pacem

by gloriouswhisperstyphoon



Series: a thousand threads of a life never lived [3]
Category: Rogue One: A Star Wars Story (2016)
Genre: Angst, Canon Compliant, Cassian Can See Ghosts, F/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-10-06
Updated: 2018-10-06
Packaged: 2019-07-27 08:22:39
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,924
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/16215194
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/gloriouswhisperstyphoon/pseuds/gloriouswhisperstyphoon
Summary: This is true: For as long as Cassian could remember, he has been able to see the ghosts. Hear them as well.This is also true: They follow him around wherever he goes, a dirty stain on his conscience.This is not true: It began happening just by chance, a nasty twist of fate.Or: An exploration of grief through the eyes of a spy who can see ghosts.





	Dona Nobis Pacem

This is true: For as long as Cassian could remember, he has been able to see the ghosts. Hear them as well. 

This is also true: They follow him around wherever he goes, a dirty stain on his conscience. 

This is not true: It began happening just by chance, a nasty twist of fate. 

No.

It’s all his fault.

But that’s getting too far ahead. 

For now, he’s on the Rings of Kafrene and he can hear a whisper of a dead man in his ear as he rushes back to his ship with the knowledge that there is a terrible weapon out there, somewhere.

This isn’t the start of this story, but it’s as good a place as any to start. 

  
  
  
  


\---

  
  
  


 

He first hears them when he’s thirteen. There’s blood on his hands, and blood on his clothes, and there’s a man tied to a chair in a dank basement who has just bled out. It’s a horror, but he keeps the knowledge of what this man has ordered in his mind.

_ The graves.  _

He keeps the image of those graves in his mind, the echoing screams and the sickly sweet smell of the plasma as it charges and fires.

_ Remember why you’re doing this, boy _ , his memory of Draven whispers in his ear. 

He keeps the image in his mind while he’s cleaning up and taking his things, while the sweet, coppery tang of blood fills his nose and fills his throat and he almost retches from it all. He clenches his fist tightly, the pain fading into him.  Each throbbing sensation of pain feels like an echo, a footstep, marking pathways across his skin that he can find in the darkness. 

He makes his way through the streets, darting through the crowd like a quicksilver shadow.

He can feel eyes on the back of his neck and he tenses, ready to fight, ready to run, ready to do whatever he needs to do in order to survive. 

And then he hears it.

A man’s voice, a hoarse whisper of confusion and pain and it cries out to him. “Where am I? Why does it hurt so much?”

His head whips around, looking everywhere for the source of the voice. 

In his heart, he knows who it is.

He heard that voice mere moments ago, screaming and begging for mercy that never came. 

He ducks his head further down, trying to block it all out, clenches his fist tighter and keeps making his way to the extraction point. 

When he reaches the extraction point, a battered ship waiting for him there, he opens his palms to see ten bloody crescents on his palms. 

The ghosts whisper on.

  
  
  
  


\---  
  


 

 

He can meet other people’s eyes, if he has to. It’s hard to, when someone is always in his ear whispering about their secrets or their weaknesses. He has learned to, but ‘learned’ suggests something that was taught to him.

He taught himself, because he has always kept his own secrets and there’s no one else who can teach him. 

He ignores the way that Draven avoids meeting people’s eyes unless he has to, and how the man moves like there are a dozen spirits dogging his every step and a lead weight on his soul. 

He keeps a list in his mind, of all the names he’s ever taken, all inked in red. There’s a list in black in there as well, the names of those he’s managed to save. He’s given up on ever repaying the debt, but he pretends that there’s a chance for it. 

He’s always been good at pretending, except when he’s not and he can always meet your eyes, except when he can’t. 

It’s not a victory, and this still isn’t the story, but it’s a start and he’s getting close. 

  
  
  
  


\---

  
  
  


 

He is nineteen and he is going to die. 

He’s on the ground, in front of a burning building, bleeding out from a stab wound in his side, the blood of a dead woman on his palms and he’s not afraid of what comes next any more. 

If he’s honest, he’s been cheating death for a very long time. First in the snowdrifts of Fest, then the battlefields of the Atrivis Sector and then the shadows of a war no one wants to acknowledge. 

Every scar and every wound he’s ever gotten, it’s never been a close brush with death, it’s more that life has not finished with him yet. Every life he’s ever taken weighs down on him and every scrap of red that he’s trying to erase from a heavy, bloody ledger. 

There are shouts from behind him and he can’t find the energy to lift his head to see who it is. He doesn’t care anymore. 

He’s spent his entire life from the age of six trying to die. He doesn’t know how to do anything else. If he’s completely honest, this is his story. 

It doesn’t end here. 

He doesn’t get the luxury of that. 

  
  
  
  


\---

  
  
  


 

When he’s seventeen, he’s walking through the Control Room of the Rebel Alliance, hidden deep in a Massassi temple, trying to focus on what Mothma’s saying. 

He narrows his eyes at her hands, where she is playing with a silver pendant embellished with the seal of the Chandrillan Senate. 

Eighteen, and he’s coming back to the Temple to speak with her, blood still under his fingernails, whispers that aren’t his own emerging from the walls.

There is the remnant of evil here, but there is also the tiniest grain of hope, and that’s why he keeps coming back here. 

He ignores the way Mothma’s eyes focus on his back, the look of pity and compassion in her eyes whenever she sees him. 

He’s moved beyond any hope of redemption, but he can try to reach it for the sake of everyone else. 

This might be his story, if he tries hard enough.

  
  
  
  


\---

  
  
  


 

He’s in a bare and sterile apartment in the Imperial District of Coruscant and it’s the noisiest place he’s ever been in his life, the sounds and glorious vibrancy of life everywhere around him.

He throws open the windows and leaves the Holonet radio on at all hours. 

_ Prevents any bugs _ , he tells himself to justify it.

But he knows the truth, that he wants to block everything out, to see nothing in the mirror except the sharp lines of his Imperial uniform, to hear nothing but newsreels and the latest trashy Holonet gossip and the sound of his own breathing.

He tries to breathe and it’s almost enough.

His story will always be almost enough.

  
  
  
  


\---  
  
  
  


 

She smells like death and he can see it coming off her, bright and green and clawed. She stuns him when he first sees her, knocks the air out of his chest so much that he can’t hear what she’s saying. He doesn’t even bother to listen. 

She smells like blood, like the ether world that he knows so well, the grey space that he moves about in. She is death and not-quite-life and she wears it so well it looks like a shroud that was made especially for her.

She smells like arterial blood and the grave and vengeance and  _ home _ .

He shouldn’t be surprised anymore, but he is. 

She’s the most beautiful thing he’s ever seen in his life. 

“Trust goes both ways,” she says, with lips that have pronounced a man’s death a dozen times. His heart skips a beat. 

He still has one, no matter how hard he’s tried. 

  
  
  
  


\----

  
  
  


 

Here is a list of things that no one else can be allowed to know about.

The massacres he ordered under Admiral Grendreef. 

_ A thousand lives for a Rebellion that could save the galaxy _ , he said to himself afterwards.

_ You needed to preserve your cover _ , Draven says to him.

He keeps a stash of drugs in his kit, hidden so well that Kay won’t be able to find them.

It’s more than just the lullaby, it’s drugs in a dosage so high that he can guarantee his death in less than five minutes, without the pain and the thrashing-about that comes from death by the potassium cyanide in the lullaby. 

When he meets his death, he wants it to be as fast and painless as possible. 

He thinks he’s earned at least that much.

He’s given up on a happy ending for his story. 

The deepest, darkest of them all: The deaths of Jedha that follow him around and weigh on him like an anchor. 

The truth: He didn’t feel horror at the knowledge of it, nor any sort of fear. His first thought was relief.

Relief that now they had some sort of proof, and that they all survived. 

It would be a relief, but for all the ways that it isn’t. 

The Imperial pilot is murmuring something under his breath, his eyes unfocused. 

The Guardians are there as well, their normally stalwart faces in shock and grief at the loss of everything that they’ve known.

And then  _ she _ is in front of him. Her eyes are furious and her face is in shock and she is too much from him and he has to turn away.

He’s always been the first to leave. 

  
  
  
  


\---

  
  
  


 

He’s twenty-six and he’s watching a man through the scope of his rifle and he can’t breathe, the man’s eyes are so familiar. 

He can feel the weight of the man’s daughter staring at him, daring him to take the shot, to seal both their fates. 

One man for the galaxy.

Isn’t that how it always goes?

He’s watching him on the platform and he’s trying to find the shot, and then he’s lowering the rifle, and then he isn’t and then he spots a familiar figure climbing up and then it’s all too much.

He can see someone following Jyn around, her robes dark with her own blood and he sees the woman brush her daughter’s shoulder gently.

He’s running towards the platform and then - he breathes in something like smoke only in name and sees white. 

This is not the story and the story isn’t power, but it’s something like it all the same, a dark path that stretches on beyond even what he can see. 

  
  
  
  


\---

  
  
  
  


He closes his eyes and he’s on the beach. He closes his eyes, and he’s in the Imperial Academy again, his hair slicked back and his accent crisp, the darkness there but not yet oppressive. Fest is like a brilliant shadow in his heart, and he clutches it close, and pushes it away with the same thought. His secrets unfurl in his chest like an ancient scroll and if there’s a story there, it’s not his to write it.

He thought it would have been Jyn, but it’s not her, and it’s not Kay’s and, funnily enough, he’s never thought that it would be himself either. Maybe another man will write it, someone’s whose ledger isn’t dripping red with the blood of others, a few paltry names written in black there. 

He closes his eyes and breathes in the smell of her hair. She’s not his, she’s never been. He can never tell her and it’s always going to be too late for them. He wants her so much that his skin aches with longing and the words he wants to speak burn behind his eyelids like a thousand burning stars. 

Cassian Andor loves Jyn Erso, but that’s never going to be the story.

Here is the greatest secret he knows.

Here is the story.

**Author's Note:**

> I'm so sorry.
> 
> I wrote this while hungover, so it's simultaneously angsty AND incomprehensible. It was supposed to be a Halloween fic, but it turned out a lot more angsty than my original idea.
> 
> The title is from the lyrics of the Roman Catholic Requiem Mass and mean "grant us peace".


End file.
